Category: news media

From time to time
on this site, we’ve examined various public figures who had a soft
spot for the Castro regime in Cuba and media organizations whose
reports from Cuba routinely focused on its purported charms rather
than its totalitarian government. We’ve written about director Bob
Yari, who filmed
a movie in Cuba; designer Karl Lagerfeld, who used Havana’s crumbling
buildings as a backdrop
for a glamorous fashion show; and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain,
who, notwithstanding his own wealth, made a point of castigation
capitalism while celebrating
the Castros. We’ve told the tale of Fidel’s affair with compliant ABC
reporter
Lisa Howard, noted the chummy relationship between Jesse
Jackson and the Castros, and, not least, the shamelessness and
fatuity with which Time
Magazine, again and again, has glorified the island prison.

Jair Bolsonaro

On January 2,
Agence France Press demonstrated that the perverse impulse to
whitewash the Cuban regime is not dead in 2019. Under the headline
“Cuba celebrates 60 years of revolution amid challenges and
change,” AFP described Cuba as a longtime “source of inspiration
for leftist Latin American governments,” but added that the nation
faces “increasing isolation in a region dominated by a resurgent
right,” notably the new Brazilian government led by “far-right
President Jair Bolsonaro.”

AFP reported that
Bolsonaro had “made a point of not inviting” the new Cuban
President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to his
inauguration, a decision that some of us might consider principled
but that AFP seemed to want readers to regard as churlish.

Nicolas Maduro

Typically, AFP
labeled Bolsonaro – a pro-American, pro-Israeli conservative who
has been dubbed the Latin American Trump – as “far-right,” and
characterized Argentina, Chile and Peru as having “all swung to the
right in recent years, unseating leftist governments.” A more
objective media outlet might have put it a bit differently – might
have said, that is, that the voters of those countries have rejected
socialism in favor of democratic capitalism.

Evo Morales

Meanwhile, in its
references to Cuba’s leaders, AFP was careful to avoid the word
“dictator,” obediently referring to Raul Castro as
“[e]x-president” and as “first secretary of the Communist
Party,” identifying the late Fidel Castro as “Cuba’s
revolutionary leader,” and giving the current thug-in-chief, Miguel
Diaz-Canel, his official title of “President.” AFP also reported
that Maduro had “paid tribute to the ‘heroic Cuban people,’” whom
he praised for their “’resistance and dignity’ in the face of ’60
years of sacrifices, struggles and blockade.’” In addition,
according to AFP, “[a]nother surviving leftist leader, Bolivia’s
Evo Morales, said Cuba’s revolution gave birth to ‘the light of hope
and invincible will for the liberation of the people.’” This
effusive rhetoric by Maduro and Morales was presented by AFP without
context, so that an ill-informed reader would never know that the
Cuban people have spent the last six decades not as stalwart patriots
who have bravely resisted a U.S. blockade but as downtrodden subjects
of a totalitarian tyranny.

Fidel Castro

To be sure, the word “dictator” did eventually appear in the AFP article – but only as a means of describing Castro’s predessor, Fulgencio Batista. To its credit, moreover, AFP also mentioned, toward the end of its article, that Cuba is a communist state. It also quoted a dissident, but that dissident, as it happened, was not an anti-Communist who opposed the Cuban Revolution from the start but a diehard Communist named Vladimiro Roca, whose father was a sidekick of Fidel Castro, who himself had run afoul of authorities and spent several years in prison, and whose complaint was therefore that the Cuban Revolution “died a long time ago.”

Donald Trump

Moreover, while AFP acknowledged that Cuba “has faced heavy criticism” abroad, it presented the Cuban people not as decades-long victims of a brutal autocracy but as having “had to contend with an increasingly hostile administration under Trump these last two years.” There’s no hint that the Trump administration is hostile not to the Cuban people but to their unelected masters. In 2019, alas, such full-scale misrepresentation continues to be par for the course for all too many Western media.

After the New York Times‘s newest editorial board member, Sarah Jeong, was revealed to have sent out hundreds of repellent tweets about white people between 2013 and 2015, leftist commentators rushed to her defense. The editors of her own previous employer, the website The Verge, not only stood up for Jeong but condemned those who dared to call out her bigotry, accusing people of “intentionally [taking]them out of context” and of subjecting poor Sarah to “an unrelenting stream of abuse” online.

In the view of the folks at The Verge, the only guilty parties here were those whose jaws dropped when they read Jeong’s tweets: they’re “dishonest and outrageous”; they’re “trolls”; they’re yet more journalist-haters who are “acting in bad faith” and who have a “malicious agenda.” These horrible people on the right, you see, “take tweets and other statements out of context because they want to disrupt us and harm individual reporters. The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation.” And it distracts terrific journalists like Jeong from their vitally important effort to “report on the most toxic communities on the internet.” This is pretty rich, given that it would be hard to find stuff on the Internet that’s more toxic than Jeong’s own tweets. But of course in the Verge mindset, attacks on other human beings are ugly only if those human beings are members of recognized victim groups.

Jim Hoft

At Fortune, Jeff John Roberts accepted the argument that Jeong’s tweets “amount to irony or barbed humor, not racism.” Humor? Irony? Sorry, no sale. In the Guardian, Sam Wolfson defended Jeong by demonizing Jim Hoft, who first drew attention to her old tweets on his site Gateway Pundit – according to Wolfson, “a far-right blog that often publishes entirely false stories that bolster the Trump administration.” (Lie.) Wolfson approvingly quoted one Ijeoma Oluo’s argument that Jeong was “using humor to get through the white supremacist bullshit this society shovels on WOC [women of color].” Wolfson helpfully added that “Jeong’s tweets arguably form part of a genre of commentary common on Twitter and in mainstream media, from the hit Netflix show Dear White People to the bestselling book Stuff White People Like, which seek to highlight the ways people of color can be excluded by white society.” Exactly how on earth, one wonders, can Jeong, a Berkeley and Harvard Law grad and Times editorial board member, be viewed as an “excluded” individual?

When we googled “Sarah Jeong” and “Times,” the first hit was from Vox, which called Jeong “a venerated tech culture journalist” and “an outspoken progressive and feminist, making her an obvious target for the right-wing internet mobs.” As Vox outlined it, the right was out to get Jeong all along and the tweets were merely a useful weapon. Poppycock. Vox, like the other leftist outlets, rejected the racist label: “To equate ‘being mean to white people’ with the actual systemic oppression and marginalization of minority groups is a false equivalency.” Again, to describe a Harvard grad and Times top dog as oppressed or marginalized is beyond absurd – it’s a postmodern ideological construct that has no connection whatsoever to lived reality.

On Thursday, we saw how the New York Times added a Korean-American woman, Sarah Jeong, to its editorial board and defended this action even after Jeong turned out to have been busy, from 2013 to 2015, sending out hate tweets about whites, men, and cops. As we noted, there were critics. But many on the left had Jeong’s back.

At the Washington Post, Eli Rosenberg and Erin B. Logan wrote a piece headlined “An Asian American woman’s tweets ignite a debate: Is it okay to make fun of white people online?” Make fun of? In the article text, they described Jeong as having “spoke[n] sarcastically about white people.” You would think Jeong’s tweets had been playful jabs at good buddies rather than calls for genocide. Rosenberg and Logan called them “old tweets,” even though the oldest of them is only five years old. Then they wrote this:

Eli Rosenberg

Without evidence that they had any bearing on Jeong’s extensive body of work, which includes a book she wrote about online harassment, these statements could have perhaps been unceremoniously dismissed as insignificant. But after conservative media seized on the story Thursday, they ignited a firestorm of debate.

What on earth are Rosenberg and Logan saying here? Are they actually suggesting that Jeong’s mountain of odious tweets have no relevance to her employment by the Times? Do they not grasp that the tweets provide a window on Jeong’s character and patterns of thought, and that they are plainly the work of a sick and vile mind – and that such a mind does not belong at the highest editorial level of a serious newspaper?

Erin B. Logan

No: to Rosenberg and Logan, apparently, Jeong’s tweets are trivial, and the whole hullabaloo over them is the fault of conservatives out to make trouble. This is how they frame it: “in a country in the midst of a painful debate about white supremacy and privilege, Jeong’s episode has exposed a deeper rift between some conservatives – whose political ideology has been marked by the rise of a president who has trafficked in racially charged rhetoric and policies – and the left, pointing to a fundamental disagreement about the nature of race and power in the United States.”

Nonsense. The U.S. is not undergoing “a painful debate about white supremacy and privilege.” White supremacy is a fever dream of the left. Actual white supremacists are exceedingly few in number and are effectively powerless. Privilege? Jeong is a Berkeley and Harvard Law grad and, now, a member of the Times editorial board. If that isn’t privilege, what is? As for President Trump’s rhetoric, there’s nothing “racially charged” about it. He has been frank and tough about very real threats to American security – namely, Islamic terrorism and murderous Latin American youth gangs – that the left prefers not to discuss because of its own twisted obsession with race.

Nolan L. Cabrera

After dismissively summing up some of the conservative reaction to Jeong’s tweets, the Post writers quoted a University of Arizona professor, Nolan L. Cabrera, who characterized the outrage as “manufactured” and as “completely decontextualized and ahistorified.” The only way to conclude that Jeong “hates white people” is to be “willfully ignorant of 400 to 500 years’ history and contemporary social context and also the context from which the tweets were sent.”

Sorry, “white men are bullshit” and “fuck the cops” are pretty straightforward – no historical analysis required. Cabrera also served up the usual postmodern line that an Asian woman can’t be racist toward a white man, because racism is a matter of “power dynamics and social oppression.” More nonsense – and even if you do buy this definition of racism, then okay, she’s not a racist, she’s a bigot. Hate is hate.

Thanks to the Internet, newspapers are in a bad way. Just the other day, without warning, the New York Daily News dumped a large percentage of its staff. The Washington Post survives thanks only to its purchase by the world’s richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has poured cash into the Post in an effort to transform it into “media and technology company.”

Carlos Slim

Meanwhile the New York Times is kept afloat by another zillionaire, Carlos Slim, who topped the list of the world’s richest guys from 2010 to 2013. owned by one of the world’s richest men. Yet Slim’s cash hasn’t protected Times staffers from job insecurity. Over the last few years, the people who run the Times have instituted various economies, large and small. In 2014, about a hundred newsroom jobs were eliminated. Last year, the paper cut the number of copy editors roughly in half.

Sarah Jeong

All of which makes the Times’s hiring of one Sarah Jeong even more puzzling. In late July, the Times announced that Jeong, a young Korean-American writer for a website called The Verge,would be joining its editorial board. It didn’t take long for Jeong’s remarkable history of tweets to make news. Written between 2013 and 2015, they reveal a stunning hatred for white people, especially white men.

“White men are bullshit,” she writes. Whites are only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” And: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” After maintaining that everything white men do other than skiing and golf is cultural appropriation, Jeong concludes: “it must be so boring to be white.” In a couple of tweets, she seems to express approval of genocide: “#cancelwhitepeople.” “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.”

She hasn’t just targeted whites. Her Twitter record contains plenty of vile stuff about the police, too: “[C]ops are assholes.” “[F]uck the cops.” “If we’re talking big sweeping bans on shit that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?”

It’s more than enough, of course, that these tweets are hateful. But in addition to that, they’re staggeringly vapid and vulgar. None of them have the remotest hint of wit or intellectual content. If somebody told you this person was headed for a job on the editorial board of the New York Times, would you ever believe it in a million years?

Andrew Sullivan

Jeong’s tweets sparked outrage. In some places, anyway. Conservative publications and websites called out the Times for hiring an obvious racist. So did Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine. But the Times held firm. In an August 2 statement, it stood by its hire, accepting her “explanation” that her ugly tweets had been responses to “torrents of online hate” that she had experienced as “a woman of color on the internet.” Her tweets about whites, cops, etc., insisted Jeong, were a form of “counter-trolling” and “intended as satire.”

Sorry, but we don’t buy it. In what way is “fuck the cops” satire? Others didn’t buy it either. But an appalling number of commentators did. Not only did they defend Jeong – they celebrated her. More on Thursday.

On Tuesday, we examined the 1963-64 meeting, mutual seduction, and unconsummated hotel-room encounter between ABC News reporter Lisa Howard and Fidel Castro. It was, as they say, hot stuff. Today, our focus will be on what Howard did back home in the U.S.: publicly, on ABC News, she did her best to improve Castro’s image in America; secretly, as Politico reported recently, she served as a channel between Castro and JFK, and then between Castro and LBJ, urging both U.S. presidents to sit down with Castro and soften their line on his dictatorship.

Adlai Stevenson

When a ten-page letter to JFK got no response, she turned it into an article urging negotiations. She huddle with Adlai Stevenson and one of his U.N. flunkies in an effort to win Kennedy’s approval for a meeting between the flunky and Cuba’s U.N. guy. That ended up happening – at Howard’s own residence, which “became the hub for secret communications between the U.S. and Cuba.”

When she finally managing to put together a phone call between a high-level American official and a Castro sidekick in Havana, she confided to her diary: “At last! At last! That first halting step. Contact has been established!…A long, frustrating, tension-filled, but exciting experience lies ahead.” More than once in Politico‘s article on the Castro-Howard connection, one gets the distinct impression that serving as a diplomatic go-between was positively aphrodisiacal for the ABC talking head.

A clip from one of Howard’s ABC News specials about Castro, showing how much his people supposedly worshiped him

She later did a TV special from Cuba – which, from Politico‘s description, sounds exactly like every mainstream TV report about the island prison that has been aired in the decades since: “Howard and her crew traipsed around Cuba with the energetic Castro, filming him playing baseball, visiting a cattle farm and interacting with peasants. As much as Howard believed Castro was a dictator, the overwhelming public adoration he generated impressed her. ‘They mob him, they scream ‘Fidel, Fidel,’ children kiss him, mothers touch him,’ she wrote. ‘They are awed, thrilled … ecstatic, but mostly passionate. There is no doubt in my mind that the emotion Fidel inspires in all women is sheer undiluted sexual desire. He is the most physical animal man I have ever known.’”

Lyndon B. Johnson

This time when they went to bed, they went all the way. She later described it as “thrilling and ecstatic—as much as anything I have ever experienced.” Even so, she recognized that “so much of what he was doing was truly evil.”

What’s a poor girl to do? Well, in this case, she kept pushing the White House to talk to Castro. Nothing came of it. (The LBJ aide she lobbied was no dummy: he concluded that it was “likely” she was getting it on with the cigar-chomping Comandante.)

But again Adlai pitched in, and Howard was sent as a secret emissary to Cuba, where “Castro arranged for Howard to stay in one of the confiscated mansions that now served as a protocol house. The house came with a Cadillac and chauffeur, a butler and cook, air-conditioned bedrooms and a sunken bathtub.”

Castro and Che

Next thing she knew, however, Howard was discarded as a U.S.-Cuba bridge. Frustrated, she “seized on the visit of Che Guevara” to the UN to restore her bona fides: she “shepherded Guevara around town—together they attended a premiere of a new documentary film commemorating the life of Kennedy—and organized a soiree for him at her New York apartment.” She offered to arrange a meeting between Che and some LBJ honcho, but her days as a power broker were over. So was her TV career: largely because of her positive portrayal of Castro, ABC fired her. On July 4, 1965, age 39, she died of a drug overdose, having loved a brutal tyrant not wisely but too well.

It’s a story that is only now being told, in Politico, “thanks to declassified official documents and, most important, Howard’s own unpublished diaries and letters.”

Lisa Howard with the Great One

Lisa Howard, an ABC News reporter, first met Fidel Castro at a Havana nightclub in 1963. They talked for hours. Their conversation was wide-ranging. She came away “impressed by Castro’s breadth of knowledge” and later wrote in a letter: “Never, never have I found a Communist interested in the sentiments of Albert Camus.”

Months later, they met again, this time in a Havana hotel room. Again, they talked for hours. She took El Comandante to task for his regime’s social repression.

“To make an honorable revolution,” she told him, “you must give up the notion of wanting to be prime minister for as long as you live.” “Lisa,” Castro asked, “you really think I run a police state?” “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”

Albert Camus

And then it happened: after the flunky who’d accompanied him was swept out of the room, Castro “slipped his arms around the American journalist, and the two lay on the bed, where, as Howard recalled in her diary, Castro ‘kissed and caressed me … expertly with restrained passion.’” They didn’t go all the way, not because she refused but because Castro chose not to: “You have done much for us, you have written a lot, spoken a lot about us. But if we go to bed then it will be complicated and our relationship will be destroyed.”

The next morning “a huge bouquet of flowers” was delivered to her room. She sent a four-page thank-you letter. “I wanted to give you something to express my gratitude for the time you granted me; for the interview; for the beautiful flowers,” it began. “I have decided to give you the most valuable possession I have to offer. Namely: my faith in your honor. My faith in the form of a letter, which, if revealed, could destroy me in the United States.”

George Bernard Shaw

In the letter, which she described as “a tribute, a poem to you—the man,” she told him: “I do not want you destroyed.…You possess what George Bernard Shaw called ‘that spark of divine fire.’” He was not a “ruthless, cynical tyrant,” she insisted. “I do not believe you have meant to hurt people, though, in all candor, I am both saddened and outraged that you have destroyed thousands and harmed many more without just cause.” She urged Castro to be true to his heart, as she perceived it:

What you have to offer the world that is meaningful and universally applicable is not some capricious brand of tropical Marxism (the world scarcely needs that), but your humanity; your compassion; your deep knowledge and sense of justice; your genuine concern for the poor; the sick; the oppressed; the defenseless; the lost; the despairing.…And your sacred duty, your solemn obligation to mankind is to make that quality ever stronger, to make it a reality for your people—all your people, every class and sector. Let flow in the most untrammeled way the goodness that is your substance and can be your salvation.

She closed the letter by addressing him as “my dearest Fidel.” She then returned to the U.S. And it’s what she did in the U.S. that really matters.

When Jon Michelet died on April 14 at the age of 73, it made the front page of the major Norwegian newspapers and led off the TV news reports. Michelet published books in a wide range of genres, but was perhaps most famous for his bestselling crime novels. His death, the media told us, was mourned by Norway’s entire literary community – and, in fact, by the Norwegian reading public. The obituaries were full of praise for his work and his collegiality. His death was called “a great loss for Norwegian literature.”

Michelet at a 2014 book-signing

What wasn’t mentioned prominently – or at all – in the reports of his death was Michelet’s politics. He was, as it happens, a key figure in Norway’s Marxist-Leninist movement. From 1972 to 1976, he worked at the Oktober publishing house, which was run by a Maoist party called the Arbeidernes kommunistparti (AKP). During his last couple of years at Oktober, he ran the place. Later, police surveillance would result in the conclusion that he was, in fact, one of the leaders of AKP.

Stalin

Later, for a time, Michelet was also on the board of the RødValgallianse, another Norwegian Communist party which would subsequently merge with AKP and another Communist party to form the current Communist party, Rødt, or Red. (The history of Communist parties in postwar Norway is a field of study in itself.)

In 1987, he toldAftenposten that he wished that Norway, during his lifetime, would admit a million immigrants. (Norway has a population of five million.) This, he explained, would result in “total social upheaval” of a kind that Rødt Valgallianse would welcome.

It gives something of an idea of Michelet’s personality that after leaving Oktober, in an effort at “self-proletarianization,” he got a job at a brewery.

In recent years, Michelet made millions on a series of books about Norwegian naval heroes. But although he was rich, he told a reporter in 2014 that “I still consider myself a Communist. Money can change people, but not me!” Indeed, after his death, Ingeri Engelstad, the current editor-in-chief at Oktober, praised him for his “solidarity” and “political engagement.”

Jon and Marte

In addition to his shelfful of books, Michelet bequeathed another gift to Norway: a daughter, Marte Michelet. The other day, in a memorial article about her father, she wrote: “Thank you for everything you gave us, everything you fought for, everything you taught us and inspired us to do.”

What did he give her, what did he teach her, what did he fight for? The answer is simple: Mao, Stalin, Communist totalitarianism. And Marte learned it all. She shares her father’s far-left politics to the hilt. After being a leader of the Communist youth group Rød Ungdom,she went on to become a newspaper columnist. In that role, she has used every dirty Stalinist trick in the book against her ideological opponents – routinely misrepresenting their views and calling them liars and racists. That’s what Daddy taught her: in the struggle for Communist utopia, no instrument is too low.

Marte Michelet

So it is that Marte is routinely quick to describe ideological opponents as liars and racists. Instead of replying to logical arguments with her own logical arguments, she coins words like “burkaphobia.” As Human Rights Service put it in 2008, Marte seems to do her best “to destroy any possibility of factual debate about immigration.” In 2009, Hege Storhaug reported on Marte’s efforts at “character assassination” in response to writers whose politics she disagreed with. When writer Steinar Lem questioned Norway’s immigration policies, Marte didn’t engage with his actual assertions; instead, she charged that he “viewed Muslim children as foreign weeds.” As Rita Karlsen wrote in response to this reprehensible mudslinging: “Quite simply, Marte Michelet should be sent to a course in manners.” Alas, good manners and devout Communism make a really, really bad fit.

Back to Cathy Areu – a Latina magazine editor who, as we saw on Tuesday, has become a familiar face on American cable news. Is she an expert in history or political science or anything like that? No. She’s a self-educated authority on the Zeitgeist, the Brave New World in which rules about things like sexual identity and bigotry have been rewritten overnight.

As we noted, Tucker Carlson has made frequent use of her services in recent months. On one episode of his show, for instance, Carlson covered the story of a white man who now identifies as a Filipino woman named Ja Du. What, he asked Areu, did she make of this? She found it “totally OK,” explaining that “it’s very American to be who you want to be.” Carlson asked facetiously if this meant that he, Carlson, could identify as “a successful hedge fund manager or an NBA star.” Areu answered without hesitation: “Absolutely!…It’s what’s on the inside that counts, not the outside.”

Sigmund Freud

Persevering in his deft use of reductio ad absurdum, Carlson asked if a human being could, on the same grounds, identify as a member of another species. But the eternally bright-eyed Areu didn’t back down: “I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s beautiful, I think it’s great!” When Carlson suggested that Sigmund Freud, for example, might consider it delusional for a person to think he was a duck or a goat, Areu retorted that it was now 2017, and society is more “accepting” now than it used to be in the dark old days of Freud.

Carlson wasn’t giving up. What, he asked Areu, if a friend of hers said he was Napoleon Bonaparte? That, too, she asserted with a cheery nod, was “okay.”

Areu with Tucker Carlson

Commenting on a news story about a male Harvard student who expressed regret for having talked to friends about attractive girls, Areu asserted that he did indeed have something to apologize for – namely, objectifying women. “That’s always been a crime, to objectify women,” she told Carlson. She further maintained that 30% of women who graduate from Harvard say they’ve been victims of sexual assault (a remarkable statistic that seems to have no basis in reality). Asked if women can objectify men in the same way that men objectify women – if, that is, one woman can say to another that she finds a certain guy cute – Areu replied, “Sure,” because “women aren’t harming anyone.” Areu added: “It’s very rare for men to be objectified,” a contention that, to anyone living in the real world, sounds rather curious.

Areu and unidentified companion outside the White House

On March 9 Areu was on Carlson’s show yet again. This time, the topic was a man who’d been fined in Belgium for the crime of sexist speech. Specifically, he had told a woman police officer that because of her sex she did not belong in that line of work. Asked if she approved of the idea of criminalizing such views, Areu said yes: sexist speech needs to be “nip[ped] in the bud,” and should be a felony in the U.S. Never mind the First Amendment: authorities need to “reintroduce profanity laws” and expand them to include sexist language. Offenders should be locked up: “when they come out,” she said, “they’ll be better people.” It was not clear whether or not Areu recognized that her proposal was right out of the playbook of the Chinese Communist Party’s Cultural Revolution. Asked if women should be susceptible to punishment too, she said no, because “women cannot be sexist.”

Who is Cathy Areu? “From debating Bill O’Reilly about the ‘war on women’ to discussing border issues with Anderson Cooper,” her website trumpets, “Cathy has been analyzing the hottest topics of the day, on the best cable TV news shows in the U.S. and beyond, for over a decade.” In other words, she’s a cable-TV talking head, who for years now has appeared frequently on the Big Three: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. She’s also the editor of Catalina Magazine, founded in 2001 “to break the stereotypes of Hispanics in the US media and entertainment.”

Nancy Pelosi

She’s celebrated the misbegotten, indefensible Diversity Visa Program, which allows immigrants into the U.S. essentially at random. Opposition to the program, she has charged, is “anti-American.” She’s also argued that 77-year-old Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi should stay on as Democratic leader in the House for no other reason than that Pelosi is a woman.

In recent months Areu has been a staple on the Tucker Carlson Show. In one exchange with Carlson, she held forth on “toxic masculinity,” for which she blamed mass shootings. “Women are better,” she stated flatly. “We are not the murderers in our society…Men are not as good as women.” Women are “the better gender.” As for men, “maybe we’re just not raising them right.” Asked whether there is such a thing as toxic femininity, she said no: “Women can do no wrong….We’re just the smarter gender.” In other words, she feels the same way about her sex as Hitler felt about his ethnic group.

White supremacy in action

On another episode, Carlson took on a professor’s accusation in a magazine article that when Westerners practice yoga, they are being racists. Areu agreed that they were. In the West, she stated, yoga is practiced mainly by white women (“not Latinos, not immigrants”) who have appropriated an activity with a rich cultural history that they don’t know about or care to understand. It’s “white supremacy,” she explained. When Carlson asked whether, by the same token, it would be wrong for people outside the West to use the Internet, a product of Western civilization. No, she said, because the Internet lacks the long, rich history that yoga has.

What, Carlson asked, about another product of Western civilization – namely, democracy, which does have a long, rich history? Areu dismissed his argument, contending that “yoga was a way for the Indians to show their colonizers that they were intelligent.” Carlson laughed: “Where do you get your history? Yoga predates the British by quite a bit.”

Areu enjoys posing for pictures backstage at her media appearances

But the whole point of Areu’s ideology is that real history is irrelevant. As Carlson himself has explained to viewers, he is presenting Areu on his show as a guide to the Brave New World in which we now live. It’s a world in which all kinds of actions or statements that a few years ago would have been considered innocuous are now virulently condemned as racist or sexist; a world in which all men are potential rapists and women, by definition, “can do no wrong”; a world, in short, in which the rules of the road have changed entirely and in which history can be rewritten at will to conform to the new rules. Areu’s entire schtick is that she’s internalized those new rules to a remarkable extent, and can defend even the most ridiculous of them without the slightest sign of intellectual embarrassment. It’s quite an accomplishment.

With his breathtaking enthusiasm for Cuba’s Castro regime? As we noted in August 2015, this is a guy who, in describing the political system on that island, prefers to say “security state” rather than “police state” or “dictatorship” or “totalitarian prison.” Of all the idiots who find Cuba’s crumbling buildings and deteriorated infrastructure appealingly exotic, he’s one of the most high-profile and outspoken, celebrating the old cars and lousy plumbing in one of the stupidest cover stories ever to be run by a major newsmagazine. When he gushed in a radio interview over Havana’s “decaying glory,” his interviewer asked how decay could be glorious, and Vick, bubblehead that he is, fumfered around, finally answering the question with a synonym: “faded grandeur.”

Moderate?

Or should we focus on Vick’s consistently starry-eyed take on all things Islamic – his thumbs-up for the “Arab Spring,” his insistence that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are moderate – and his equally consistent hostility toward Israel? For a 2010 cover story arguing that Israel is anti-peace, he won a “Dishonest Reporting Award” from Honest Reporting (HR) and was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for echoing the stereotype that Jews are preoccupied with money. In later articles, Vick stuck to his guns, absurdly depicting Palestinians (in HR’s words) as “Gandhian acolytes” and describing Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel as only “[n]ominal.”

Donald Trump: the truth hurts

In short, he’s a fool. And nothing has changed. For now, just one example. Last December, after Donald Trump’s election but before the inauguration, he warned that the president-elect was “making terrorist attacks more likely.” How? By taking a “them-against-us” approach. You’ve likely heard this argument before: when we’re honest about the nature of the jihadist enemy, we alienate “moderate Muslims,” perhaps even turning some of them into mass murderers. Vick quoted a Darmouth professor and former State Department grind who warned that ISIS was “now in a much better position to make the case that the West really is determined to destroy Islam.” Vick praised George W. Bush for having said, less than a week after 9/11, that “Islam is peace.”

ISIS, Trump: two sides of the same coin?

Does Vick think this is true? He doesn’t say. His argument is that, true or not, if you’re a president you’d better say such things. One is reminded of the familiar joke: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say otherwise, we’ll kill you. In a classic example of moral equivalency, Vick essentially cast Trump and ISIS as two sides of the same coin, both determined to drive Muslims and non-Muslims apart. Vick served up what should by now be a long-discredited canard that jihadist “extremism” is driven by “feelings of aggrievement.” No, it’s driven by a determination to conquer that is rooted in Islamic texts.

After the terrorist attack on Breitscheidplatz square in Berlin, December 19, 2016

Vick slammed Trump for reacting to last December’s terrorist attack in Berlin – the one that involved a truck and took 12 lives – by making the purely factual statement that “ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad.” In Vick’s view, apparently, if we want peace with Islam, we’ve got to keep mum about what is being done to Christians in the Middle East in the name of Allah. The one “glimmer of hope” (to use Vick’s own words) in the article was that “Trump may be educable.” In other words, he may yet learn from the MSM and Foggy Bottom hacks to tell supposedly strategic untruths.